The mission of the bioinformatics core is to provide strong and timely bioinformatic support to the proposed projects, and to develop novel bioinformatic approaches/tools for the biological problems proposed in this research. The ultimate goal of this core is to promote and catalyze interdisciplinary research by providing a platform for interaction between computational scientists and biologists or cancer researchers, as well as to create training opportunities for postdoctoral fellows or graduate students. The core has two major functions: (1) provide bioinformatic or statistical support/consulting; (2) pursue creative and original interdisciplinary research. The data generated from cancer research nowadays is often complex. The challenges arise not only due to its variety, but also its scale. In addition to the clinical data, the commonly seen data types include the high-throughput DNA sequence data, SNP data, micorarray gene expression data, protein sequence data, proteomic mass spectra data and image data etc. How to manage and analyze such large-scale data requires specialty support in bioinformatics. The routine support to be provided by the bioinformatics core includes: Exploratory statistical analyses Microarray gene expression experiment design and data analysis Data storage and management including database construction and maintenance Statistical analysis of genetic data, e.g. QTL, eQTL, association test High-throughput DNA sequence analysis, e.g. BLAST Proteomics/mass-spectra data analysis.